Weekend update

I bet you’re wondering about my weekend activities. Yesterday was beautiful outside — I did five minutes of gardening, took a long walk, baked a loaf of bread — but I suspect it’s my Saturday in a windowless office that interests you more.

We accomplished a lot here on Saturday, completing a big files-all-over-the-place task that’s much harder to do when the office is open for business. Let me give you a sense of where everything is: Nearly all (let’s call it 90%) of the decisions to admit or deny are set. Most of the scholarship decisions for admitted applicants have also been made, though we continue to tinker and make sure we don’t go over-budget. At around this time, it always seems like there’s a lot to wrap up, but experience says that we’ll move quickly through the to-do list.

Meanwhile, we feel the heat as our (friendly) competitors release their decisions. But our competitive juices are balanced by our need to get everything just right.

Here’s a bit of info I should have shared earlier: Once we have the decisions posted, we’ll send you an email telling you to check your account in the Graduate Application Management System. I encourage you to confirm you’re able to log in, but you don’t need to check your account by the hour. A related key point is that you should be sure you’re receiving our emails. If you have any doubt, scrounge around your spam folder for past messages, and make sure that Fletcher Admissions is an approved email sender. Once you receive the email prompting you to check the system, you can log in and find the decision letter. Students who are admitted will also receive a packet by mail in the coming weeks.

And one last note. In some years, there’s a small bunch of straggler decisions. The applications may have been here since January (though many arrived for MIB and LLM on March 1), but for whatever reasons a decision isn’t in place. We face the challenge of deciding whether to hold all decisions, so that all applicants hear at the same time, or release everything that’s ready, which will leave a few people wondering. This year, we’re going to go with option #2. When decisions finally go out, all the MALD and MA applicants should hear at once. Most MIB, LLM, and PhD applicants will also hear at that time. A few decisions will be posted within about a 10-day window after the first big batch. I’m sorry that it’s going to turn out that way this year, but that’s what it looks like.

I had planned to provide information about decisions today, but I’ll hold off just one more day and get to it tomorrow.

I’m glad the blog’s usefulness extends beyond applicants to the members of their family! What can I say in answer to your question that will calm nerves rather than raising anxiety? I can guarantee that virtually, if not all, applicants will know their decisions by March 19. Within the two week window between now and then, I hesitate to naively promise anything more certain than that. In both of the last two years, decisions were released a bit late and/or in a way a little less orderly than we prefer. I’d rather have everyone pleasantly surprised than irritated and anxious. Like I wrote, though, we feel like we’re still in the middle of a zillion things — but those zillion things tend to wrap up in a hurry.

As the wife of an applicant, I find your blog very helpful! I know you cannot likely share specific dates, but it sounds like the majority of the MALD applicants should hear about their admission status quite soon – could that realistically happen sometime this week or will it more likely happen next week?